Biografía

Guy St-Amour

Acrobatic Equipment and Rigging Designer

Guy St-Amour has been involved in the performing arts for more than 30 years. He began his career in 1975 as a technician and has participated in an impressive number of projects in theatre, cinema, television and circus. In 2002, he was selected to contribute his talents to Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee Royal Visit to Canada and in 2005 he worked on the Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan’s Centennial Celebration of the Arts.

Guy is one of the Cirque du Soleil pioneers, working in a number of technical direction capacities between 1984 and 1995. He participated in the creation of rigging systems for aerial numbers, special effects, acrobatic equipment and set design elements. He has been interested in audio since 1984, and created the sound design for Nouvelle Expérience in 1989. He also designed, created and supervised the installation of the big tops for Cirque’s European and North American tours between 1989 and 1995. Viva ELVIS is his third Cirque production as a designer. In the early 2000s, he designed the tent and bleachers for Cheval Théâtre, the equestrian show created by Gilles Ste-Croix.

In 1987 Guy founded his own consulting company which has worked for scores of clients including Expo ‘98 in Portugal (for which he created a teleport simulator), the Montreal Casino, the National Film Board of Canada, the Just For Laughs comedy festival, Opéra de Montréal’s Carmen Sous les Étoiles and the Montreal International Jazz Festival. At the same time he is intensely involved in training the next generation of technicians in Quebec, teaching at the National Theatre School, the École Nationale de Cirque and the Montreal-based circus arts national network En Piste.

In 2006 Guy created the motorized equipment and special effects for the show Joe Dassin in Montreal and the acrobatic equipment and rigging for the Cirque du Soleil show LOVE in Las Vegas. He followed that with the set and production design for a concert by the singer Chantal Chamandy, staged in Egypt in 2007. He then worked as a safety consultant on a production of The Ring of the Nibelung directed by Robert Lepage at the Metropolitan Opera.

"The scale of the theatre and the sheer number of set changes calls for more and bigger acrobatic equipment than any other show we’ve done,” says Guy St-Amour. “Whether it’s the giant guitar, a 14-meter aluminum bridge that supports two acrobats, or the Jungle Gym, a parallel bar structure used in the GI Blues number, everything is like Elvis himself: It’s all larger than life."